"In My Head, I'm Always Thin"

For Daphne Merkin, her increasing weight was taboo, even in her own mind.

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Here's the odd part: In my head, I am always thin. The persistence of this mental picture, given the alarming number on the scale, is such that I have intermittently wondered whether I suffer from an as-yet-unrecognized psychiatric condition that is the opposite of body dysmorphic disorder, the main symptom of which is an overly positive view of one's appearance. Or it might well be that this unchanging (and, let's face it, warped) perspective goes back to beginnings, to the first image of oneself in the mirror.

I had been thin as a girl, just naturally, and then grew into a relatively thin young woman. Narrow hipped and tight of butt, with long, slender legs and full breasts—the sort of body that men reflexively eye, with enough shapeliness to cause a photographer to stop me one spring day on West 72nd Street, many years ago, and ask if I was interested in posing for Playboy. Not skeletally, tormentedly, time-consumingly thin, mind you—a size 8 or 10 as opposed to a 2 or 4. I wasn't overwhelmingly careful about what I ate, and I worked out erratically, except for those times when I felt my weight inching upward and I'd get more serious about running or hitting the gym or going off to a spa to rev things up a bit.

This state of affairs remained more or less true, take or leave 10 to 15 pounds, throughout my twenties and up until my midthirties, when I got married, became pregnant shortly thereafter, and put on a whopping 50 pounds. I eventually got the weight off, although not with nearly the alacrity of a Jessica Alba, and returned to my previous size. At some point in my late thirties, I decided to have the breast reduction I'd been debating ever since pregnancy had expanded my already big breasts, after which I looked more proportionate and less matronly on top. There is a photo of me with a boyfriend (I was divorced by then), taken at a friend's house one summer in my early forties, in which I look impressively lean in a polo shirt and shorts—my arms and legs taut and my face at its angular, high-cheekboned best. I remember that boyfriend as being both an avid flirt and conspicuously weight conscious, and while I was with him I became ever so slightly more vigilant than I had been. I didn't count calories, precisely, because the very thought of doing so bored me, and I would have felt as if I were doing so only to please a man, like the most submissive of geishas, but I did try harder to deny some of my fattier cravings.

And then, somewhere, somehow—abetted no doubt by the inevitable slowing of metabolism that comes with age, by a raft of antidepressants, some of which are known to sling on the pounds, and, most incriminatingly, by a new habit of high-calorie snacking at 3 a.m.—I became inarguably overweight. Heavy, in other words. Or, in yet other words—oh dear God, do I dare try on the shameful term, unleashing all manner of self-hatred in its wake: FAT. Yes, I'll try it on again, this time in less-anguished lowercase: fat. Not, to the naked eye, obese, if only because my still-slender legs and still-trim butt saved me from an overall impression of amplitude. But I'd certainly sized myself out of Barneys and most of the clothes I coveted, which assumed the presence of a waist, a narrow back, and thin upper arms. Both waist and back had widened to such an extent that I never wore anything tucked in and sought out pants with elastic waistbands. My upper arms, while not enormous—certainly not "as big as those maroon-skinned bolognas that hang from butchers' ceilings," which is how Judith Moore describes her arms in her poignant memoir, Fat Girl—had lost their natural definition to the point that I rarely went sleeveless anymore. Not to mention that I felt like an out-of-breath caboose whenever I ventured outside.

I must admit it makes me uneasy to write about all this, to render my predicament in crisp black-and-white for anyone to read and assess. There are, I believe, many reasons for this discomfort, but two in particular stand out. First, like many women who with age put on more weight than is culturally acceptable or than they themselves accept, I walk around with a self-protective veil—worn so unconsciously as to be almost second nature. I don't see myself, that is, with quite the same piercing clarity, the same objectifying gaze as I imagine others do, because it would be too painful and, at its most extreme, lead to my never leaving the house for fear of public scrutiny. Second, the stigma that fatness carries in the Western world at this moment is truly impossible to underplay. As not a few experts have observed, we've pathologized the problem of obesity beyond any corroborating medical reality. "The bulk of the epidemiological evidence," notes Paul Campos in The Diet Myth, "suggests that it is more dangerous to be 5 pounds 'underweight' than 75 pounds 'overweight.' " No less significantly, we've attached a reflexive moral judgment to the issue. J. Eric Oliver in Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America's Obesity Epidemic argues that fatness has become "a scapegoat for all our ills" and that, against our "own chronic feelings of helplessness," the body "remain[s] one of the last areas where we feel that we should be able to exercise some autonomy." Being thin is viewed as a reflection of sterling character, while being fat suggests internal disorder and a lack of self-respect. In admitting to being overweight, I feel like I'm admitting to something truly heinous—something that overrides the more positive aspects of my character.

I am, it goes without saying, unhappy about my size. I am unhappy enough to have tried in the last two years alone a number of different approaches to weight loss. There were my five days at the Pritikin center in Miami, where I walked around in a ceaseless state of craving—a "yearning in the mouth," as one writer puts it—for something other than fruits and vegetables. My beloved carbs were off the menu, with the result that all I could think about as I went from aerobics class to one on deciphering food labels was pasta and rice, great heaping bowls of them. It was at Pritikin that I learned that no one has ever gotten fat from eating bananas, even several at one sitting (small comfort, this). It was also at Pritikin that I finally came to realize that what I thought of affectionately as my "sweet tooth" had morphed in recent times—ever since I'd basically given up on becoming thin again—into nothing less than a full-blown sugar addiction. I hate the overuse of addiction paradigms, but how else to characterize the thinking of someone who lives for dessert, as I do, stops off at Dean & DeLuca in the afternoon to buy glazed apple fritters, and has scarfed down an entire box of pillowy, chocolate-enrobed Mallomars hours after purchasing them?

I've also briefly availed myself of the services of celebrity diet guru David Kirsch, who is known for getting the last stalled pounds off types like Heidi Klum. My problem here was that, although I gave my all during the one-on-one training sessions and listened raptly as David laid out the draconian principles of weight loss (basically: eat nothing and keep on the move), I promptly went into high-resistance mode when it came time to actually apply these principles. I lasted, if I remember correctly, exactly one day on his prescribed three-day initial cleanse (which he then magnanimously decided I could skip) and less than two days on his regimen of protein shakes (the taste of which I couldn't warm up to) and itty-bitty meals (whose scantiness left my stomach growling, a sound that may make other women feel triumphant but makes me feel furiously deprived) before I sailed off into the comforting embrace of a buttery grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich.

The problem, truth be told, is even bigger, as I discover when I go back and read an e-mail I wrote to myself as a kind of virtual food journal, on the weekend before my first appointment with Kirsch: I am relieved there are a few days between me and the dreaded date. I commence to eat with ever greater abandon, convinced that every morsel of everything is my last. Two nights in a row I get out of bed, go into the kitchen and make myself a glass of chocolate milk with three or four heaping tablespoons of Nestlé Nesquik, the one with less sugar. I love Nesquik, even though generally I have only highbrow taste when it comes to chocolate. I drink one glass and then a second. I am happily sloshing down a third when I remind myself that nothing goes better with Nesquik than Skippy Peanut Butter (Super Chunky, reduced fat). So I start eating peanut butter by the tablespoon and end up taking it to bed with me. I forget my spoon in the kitchen, so I finish off the jar first with my finger and then a nail file. I feel gluttonous and gratified both. I feel like this is better than the best sex, just me and my taste buds and the Skippy going down.

It seemed that without realizing it, I'd become one of those pathetic creatures out of a Geneen Roth book about emotional eating, one of those self-destructive women who goes to the garbage to retrieve the cookies she has just thrown out in the effort to put temptation out of reach. I'm everything that Roth's women are: I mistake food for love, feel desperate when faced with a landscape of restricted (or, as some might see it, healthy) choices, need my favorite foods now. There is no future filled with guilt and self-flagellation coming down the pike when I'm in the zone, my Skippy and me. Or, if I do glimpse it, I choose to pay no attention.

Nonetheless, I don't give up on trying to rustle myself into shape, because when it comes right down to it—to getting up in the morning, facing my closet of increasingly limited sartorial choices, and heading out into the cruel, anorexic world of upper-end Manhattan—I feel imprisoned in my inflated body. Much as I try to disguise it with narrow pants and oversize tops, much as I try to disguise it from myself, there is never a time when I'm not aware of being overweight. From there, it is only a matter—depending on whether I'm in the presence of people who know me well or whether I'm about to step into a first-time situation, such as a dinner party or an interview with someone I've never met before—of being more or less aware. It is in these latter instances, especially when I'm dashing around at the penultimate moment, trying to conjure up the best presentation for my incommodious self (do I go with the black leggings? Or the black pants? The black sweater? Or the long-sleeved black T-shirt under a black cardigan?) and come head-on with my face in the mirror, a face that has lost its once appealing boniness, that I come closest to falling apart, swept through by a pervasive sense of sorrow for all that I've lost by piling on so much extraneous flesh.

If this feeling stayed with me, if I didn't whisk it away, perhaps I'd be willing to do what is necessary to regain my body. I'd be willing, that is, to give up the immediate, tangible gratification of calorie-rich edibles for the more complex and amorphous gratification of being slender. As it is, I make commitments to righteous eating that I immediately undo, overcome by a feeling of deprivation so profound it makes me dizzy—a feeling that goes back to childhood, when my siblings and I argued over who would get seconds (there was never enough to go around, despite our Park Avenue address) and were given bag lunches composed of white bread slathered with butter and chocolate sprinkles to take to school. I fly, for instance, across the country to spend six days at a gemlike spa called the Pearl Laguna, in Laguna Beach, California. I huff and puff up and down mountains, always the slowest and most unfit in a group of uniformly fit women; try yoga once again only to reconfirm that I actively dislike it; and eat tiny, tasty, exquisite-looking meals that, amazingly, fill me up. By the end of my stay I've taken off nine pounds and many inches. This should be inducement enough to make me feel that I've begun the journey toward reaching a goal in which I profess to be interested, but instead of carrying a sense of mission with me back to New York, I discard any sense of renewed dedication on the flight home, diving into the hot-fudge sundae topped with real whipped cream that comes with my business-class meal. Despite its tasting like nirvana after my chaste spa menu of nuts, egg whites, and berries, my faltering resolution both appalls and confounds me. It's not as though I lack self-discipline in all areas of life (although I'd be lying if I said it was my strong suit), and yet when it comes to exerting some control over what I put into my mouth, I give up at the first opportunity without a whimper. Why should this be?

C-c-c-c-ookies, you love those c-c-c-c-ookies, don't you," says a man I've known for decades, deliberately stuttering to make his point, a man with whom I once had an affair, a man who was once ferociously attracted to me. This man knows how much he comes in at on the scale to within a half pound on a daily basis and keeps careful track of the weights of the women he's involved with. These are habits I find odious, proof of his inveterate narcissism, but even so, his opinion means something to me. He has watched me blow up over the years with an air of puzzlement and slight disbelief verging on hostility. When he first met me, I weighed about 120 pounds (I was going to write 118, but that kind of crazy precision reminds me of him) and I worked out three times a week at the same gym he belonged to. He was focused on getting me into bed from the start, and, as I said, we eventually ended up there, years later. These days he still greets me with long kisses, but he isn't one to stand on ceremony about what he really thinks. Several years ago, in the middle of a conversation in my living room, he told me, right out, that I had become "unfuckable" at my present weight. I'd never thought of myself in such either/or terms—as inherently fuckable or not—and that I could be categorized so brutally froze me in my tracks. I grew enraged at my friend's effrontery but also weakened by searing humiliation, as though I'd been slapped hard across the face. I've never forgotten (or forgiven) his remark, and although it has not proven literally to be true, and I don't believe all men share his attitude, it has a whiff of bottom-line, sexist truth.

I look back, trying to recall a tipping point, a moment when I ceased obsessing over food and weight and dieting and just carried on as I am. "Letting herself go, as happens when one withdraws from the field of love." This is a sentence that has stayed with me, from J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace, haunting my nights when I've turned off the light and cannot fall asleep. In the mix of factors that have brought me to a present in which I am heavier than when I was pregnant, there is surely something to be said about men—or the current lack of them—in my life. On the one hand, I miss them, I do miss them, but on the other, I can't help but wonder if my weight is in part an obstacle I place in the path to heterosexual intimacy, a way to ensure that I won't have to engage in a dance I've always found as problematic as pleasurable. Could I be attached to my weight, the frayed obduracy of it, the way one can get attached to a worn-out nightgown? I wonder if I'd care so much if I were a lesbian, if I lived in a small town, if I weren't interested in fashion, if, if, if….

In my head I am always thin, because—but can it be this simple?—for most of my life I was. One day, when I'm ready, maybe I'll go back to my old, svelte self. Meanwhile, I've been making plans to start exercising again, scheduling and breaking appointments with a guy named Joe Burt—who, in the way of all ambitious trainers, has embarked on plans for starting his own gym in the time I have been doing nothing for the greater good of my body other than strolling to and from the crosstown bus. Meanwhile, I continue to buy junk food, c-c-c-c-ookies, and sometimes ice cream, and yes, hot-fudge sauce (ordered from the website of Stonewall Kitchen), and sometimes even chemical-ridden Cool Whip to snack on at night, as though I were throwing my 10-year-old self a series of birthday parties for no reason other than that I can. My daughter is worried that if I don't take better care of myself I'll keel over soon. I see her point but can't figure out how to please both of us. I can't think of a woman even vaguely in my own age group who does not watch her caloric input like a hawk. And that, pure and simple, is not how I want to live.

Here's another odd part: What no one seems to realize is that even at my present weight I'm controlling myself. If I weren't, I'd already be Edie Middlestein, the doomed 332-pound heroine of Jami Attenberg's wise and funny novel The Middlesteins. Edie, needless to say, loves to eat, to the dismay of everyone around her. When she takes her daughter, Robin, a former fat girl, to a Chinese restaurant, there is no stopping her: "Edie seemed to be ignoring the fact that her daughter was across the table from her, or at least she did an excellent job of pretending she was alone. She ate everything on every plate, each bite accompanied with a thick forkful of white rice. Edie came and she conquered, laying waste to every morsel. Robin wondered what her mother felt like when she was done. Was it a triumph? Eleven seafood dumplings, six scallion pancakes, five pork buns, the pounds of noodles and shrimp and clams and broccoli and chicken. Not that anyone was counting. Was there any guilt? Or did she hope to simply pass out and forget what had just happened?"

I'm not going to tell you what happens to Edie, but somewhere along the way she finds acceptance, and somewhere else along the way her ex-husband, Richard, believes he has "a glimmer of an understanding" into her self-destructive romance with eating: "Because food," Richard thinks, "was a wonderful place to hide." The minute I read that sentence I hear a click in my head; I know I've just found a piece to the puzzle of overeating. It has something to do with the ordeal of visibility, something to do with the desire—mine as well as Edie's—to disappear. And something, as long as we're getting all existential about it, to do with the burden of consciousness and the wish to tune out, to blur the edges of things. Not to overlook that eating, for many of us, is an immensely satisfying way of nurturing the self—and I'm not referring here to wanton midnight foraging but to the deep pleasure of connecting to another person, man or woman, during a long, delicious meal at some intimate boîte where the lights cast a flattering glow. Any way you look at it, food has a lot to answer for. In my head, I am always thin.